Category Archives: Marketing

Google’s Search Suggest is a wonderous feature. Not only does it save humans beings around the planet millions of key entries each day, it’s also a phenomenal keyword research tool for marketers. For reasons that likely center around its commercial intent bias, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool often doesn’t show large swaths of data around keywords, e.g.:

If you take the AdWords Keyword Planner on faith, you’d believe that there are no keyword searches with any volume that contain the words “what are books.” But, we know better…

Sigh… Every few years, there’s a renewed effort in the worlds of shoddy journalism, clickbait, and cheap pageviews to claim the death of SEO. Recently, a few articles, a handful of folks on Twitter, and some presentations I’ve come across have been using this chart to PROVE that this time, SEO really is dying:

See how there’s a slight downward trend from the middle of 2012 to today? Our doom must be at hand!

Those of us in the search world know that Google Trends isn’t particular accurate or precise, but even as a harsh critic of the data, I’d agree that at least broadly, on search terms with very large amounts of volume (thousands of searches each month or more), the trendlines are rarely outright lies. That being the case, isn’t this graph showing a decline in the interest around SEO? And if that’s what’s being shown, isn’t there at least a little merit to the idea that SEO is on a downward trajectory?

Nope. No. And more no. Let’s walk through some analogous search trends to show why and what’s really going on.

This post is going to sound like clickbait to some, irrational to others, and probably sane to only a handful of practitioners, but I think it’s a frequent and important enough topic to put out there anyway. Almost every time I’m interviewed about SEO or asked about the practice at a conference, I’m asked “how can I keep up with SEO when the algorithms are changing all the time?” There are three assumptions inherent in this question that I want to challenge:

Doing SEO well at any level requires keeping up with the day-to-day changes and minutiae

I don’t particularly like the phrase “thought leader” or “thought leadership” for two reasons: 1) just *thinking* about something doesn’t make you a leader, nor does being a leader enable you to simply think about things AND 2) the term has pretentious and sometimes negative associations. When I hear people describe me that way, I have a viscerally uncomfortable reaction. I kinda wish the terminology would go away.

That said, at the recent Foundry CEO Summit, a number of the CEOs asked me to talk about and share my “secrets to becoming a thought leader” in the marketing space. They weren’t buttering me up (I don’t think) – they just wanted to understand how to build a more compelling, well-known profile for themselves or people at their companies. That’s a noble goal and it fits exactly with what I love talking and teaching about – better marketing! And so, this post exists to try and share some of the non-obvious, lesser-understood pieces I’ve observed.

Audience at Hubspot’s Inbound 2014; I love how, about halfway through the panorama, folks in the audience start noticing and waving

Before we can do that, we need to sum up what it is CEOs and marketers are attempting to achieve through “thought leadership.” In my experience, the list of tactics is long, but the strategy is almost always the same:

Yesterday, a Mozzer shared this video with the company over an allstaff thread. I started watching, as I usually do, thinking that 1-2 minutes into the video I’d give up and get back to my email. Wrong. For 19 minutes and 5 seconds, I was captivated. The video isn’t lovely or beautifully done, but it is fascinating, and it told a story with which I was unfamiliar (about a game designer named Phil Fish) with lessons remarkably applicable to the world of marketing.

If you’re A) in marketing, B) curious about the nature of fame, and/or C) fascinated how the web amplifies and changes human behavior, you should watch it.

There are a tremendous number of claims from across the search marketing world that negative SEO (the practice of knocking someone else’s website/page(s) out of search results by pointing spam links at them) is not only possible, but has been done. One of the most recent and, IMO, most credible came via this SERoundtable post (where 48% of respondents to a poll said they were personally able to knock a competitor out of the rankings).

Unfortunately, what we don’t have is a solid, compelling, public example that proves the risk and helps unite the industry and press to nudge Google into making changes.

It’s my belief that even a single public example of an innocent website – one that’s never engaged in active SEO or link building – getting removed from the search results through third-party action would be strong encouragement to Google’s search quality and webspam teams to revise their current practices. I’m passionate about this because I don’t believe that the status quo of forcing site owners to police their own links through Webmaster Tools is fair, viable, or moral. Google managed spam for a decade without requiring site owners to live in constant fear of links that might harm them, and I think they can manage it just fine again.

For a long time, folks in the search, technology, and marketing worlds have surmised that Google is using query and clickthrough data to bias search result rankings. I recently observed several examples of this via some industry colleagues (that, unfortunately, I cannot share publicly), and thought, “what the heck, let’s give it a spin.” On April 30th, at 6:03pm Pacific, I performed the following query:

A blog post I’d published last week ranked number 7 in Google US results (incognito/logged-out, without regional geographic bias), the same as it had a week prior just after I wrote it (sadly, I forgot to take a screenshot last week when I first looked at the ranking). After noting the position and taking a screenshot, I sent this tweet:

Over the next few hours, people on Twitter took action, and responded back. And then something fascinating happened:

Over the last few months, I’ve been running some experiments in Google’s search engine and on social media platforms with friends & colleagues. The results have been really exciting to see, but the more I invest in these efforts, the more I perceive that our small group is not enough. To truly validate, repeat, and scale the kinds of experiments we want to perform, we need help – we need a cooperative.

Starting today, I’m launching a small, private test pilot of a program I’m tentatively calling IMEC Lab. IMEC stands for “Internet Marketing Experimental Collective.” The goal is to assemble a group of marketers who care about producing high-quality, consistent, repeatable experiments in search engines and on social media to learn more about how these platforms work. If this sounds like it’s potentially up your alley, read on.

Geraldine and I don’t have kids, but for some reason, the last few months, I’ve spent innumerable conversations talking to our many friends with children about the tradeoffs of public vs. private schooling. As is my nature, I couldn’t help but research the topic on the web. And in nearlyeverypiece I read, the same few messages emerge:

Private education and Ivy League Schools are correlated with higher incomes in the job market (but if students’ socioeconomic backgrounds are controlled for, the difference is far less great)

This probably isn’t a big surprise. The web has put many public schools and universities on more equal footing with their elite, private peers, and the Ivy Leagues couldn’t maintain a lock on the best teachers even if that was their sole focus (which, according to most of my reading, is not the case). Brand, history, alumni networks, and social connections make sense as drivers of the disparity between graduates of certain schools vs. others.

But this blog post isn’t actually about private vs. public education or about Ivy League Schools. It’s about how to get that network, even if you didn’t go to an elite school.

It struck me that this is a topic about which many folks in and around web marketing professions are curious about. With some of the recent changes Google’s made around link building practices, brand biasing, and intent matching. And, since my opinions on the topic are unique from Mr. Nielsen’s I thought I’d share. Here’s how Nielsen opened:

“Our ‘secrets and techniques’ no longer work and creative agencies, writers, and PR specialists look down on us as the ‘hacks’ of the marketing world.”

And here’s how he concluded:

“Let PR agencies continue to send press releases ‘over the wire’ and let ad agencies continue to create brand awareness. We need to stick to what we do best – connecting with highly engaged audiences.”

I agree with the framing that other marketers often have of those in the SEO field. To be fair, a fair number of bad apples have email spammed, crapped up blog comments, and keyword-stuffed that perception into the web’s conscious. But I can’t get behind the idea that what SEOs do best is “connecting with highly engaged audiences.” I think describing SEOs as merely outreach specialists demeans the hugely important, vast swath of work for which professional SEOs are responsible.